Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (6 page)

In the morning, Penumbra has barely made it through the front door before I am recounting what happened, saying it too fast and out of order, I mean, what was that guy’s problem, and who is Corvina, and what’s this package, and seriously, what was his
problem
—

“Calm yourself, my boy,” Penumbra says, lifting his voice and his long hands to quiet me. “Calm yourself. Slow down.”

“There,” I say. I point at the parcel like it’s a dead animal. For all I know, it is a dead animal, or maybe just the bones of one, laid out in a neat pentagram.

“Ahhh,” Penumbra breathes. He wraps his long fingers around the parcel and lifts it lightly from the desk. “How wonderful.”

But of course it’s not a box of bones. I know exactly what it is, and I’ve known since the pale-faced visitor stepped into the store, and somehow the truth of it is freaking me out even more, because it means that whatever’s happening here is more than just one old man’s eccentricity.

Penumbra peels back the brown paper. Inside, there’s a book.

“A new addition to the shelves,” he says. “
Festina lente
.”

The book is very slim but very beautiful. It’s bound in brilliant gray, some kind of mottled material that shimmers silver in the light. The spine is black, and in pearly letters it says
ERDOS
. So the Waybacklist grows by one.

“It has been quite some time since one of these arrived,” Penumbra says. “This requires a celebration. Wait here, my boy, wait here.”

He retreats through the shelves into the back room. I hear his shoes on the steps that lead up to his office, on the other side of the door marked
PRIVATE
through which I have never ventured. When he returns, he carries two foam cups stacked one inside the other and a bottle of scotch, half-empty. The label says
FITZGERALD’S
and it looks about as old as Penumbra. He pours a half inch of gold into each cup and hands one to me.

“Now,” he says, “describe him. The visitor. Read it from your logbook.”

“I didn’t write anything down,” I confess. In fact, I haven’t done anything at all. I’ve just been pacing the store all night, keeping my distance from the front desk, afraid to touch the parcel or look at it or even think about it too hard.

“Ah, but it must go into the logbook, my boy. Here, write it as you tell it. Tell me.”

I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen:

“The store was visited by a presumptuous jackass—”

“Er—perhaps it would be wisest not to write that,” Penumbra says lightly. “Say perhaps that he had the aspect of … an urgent courier.”

Okay, then: “The store was visited by an urgent courier named Corvina, who—”

“No, no,” Penumbra interrupts. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Stop. Before you write, I will explain. He was extremely pale, weasel-eyed, forty-one years old, with a thick build and an ill-advised beard, wearing a suit of smooth wool, single-breasted, with functioning buttons at the cuffs, and black leather shoes that came to sharp points—correct?”

Exactly. I didn’t catch the shoes, but Penumbra has got this one nailed.

“Yes, of course. His name is Eric, and his gift is a treasure.” He swirls his scotch. “Even if he is too enthusiastic in the playing of his part. He gets that from Corvina.”

“So who’s Corvina?” I feel funny saying it, but: “He sends his regards.”

“Of course he does,” Penumbra says, rolling his eyes. “Eric admires him. Many of the young ones do.” He’s avoiding the question. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he lifts his eyes to meet mine. “This is more than a bookstore, as you have no doubt surmised. It is also a kind of library, one of many around the world. There is another in London, another in Paris—a dozen, altogether. No two are alike, but their function is the same, and Corvina oversees them all.”

“So he’s your boss.”

Penumbra’s face darkens at that. “I prefer to think of him as
our patron
,” he says, pausing a little on each word. The
our
is not lost on me, and it makes me smile. “But I suspect Corvina would agree wholeheartedly with your characterization.”

I explain what Eric said about the books on the short shelves—about Penumbra’s disobedience.

“Yes, yes,” he says with a sigh. “I have been through this before. It is foolishness. The genius of the libraries is that they are all different. Koster in Berlin with his music, Griboyedov in Saint Petersburg with his great samovar. And here in San Francisco, the most striking difference of all.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, we have books that people might actually want to read!” Penumbra guffaws at this, and shows a toothy grin. I laugh, too.

“So it’s no big deal?”

Penumbra shrugs. “That depends,” he says. “It depends how seriously one takes a rigid old taskmaster who believes that everything must be exactly the same everywhere and always.” He pauses. “As it happens, I do not take him very seriously at all.”

“Does he ever visit?”

“Never,” Penumbra says sharply, shaking his head. “He has not been to San Francisco in many years … more than a decade. No, he is busy with his other duties. And thank goodness for that.”

Penumbra lifts his hands and waves them at me, shooing me away from the desk. “Go home now. You have witnessed something rare, and more meaningful than you know. Be grateful for it. And drink your scotch, my boy! Drink!”

I swing my bag up onto my shoulder and empty my cup in two stiff gulps.

“That,” Penumbra says, “is a toast to Evelyn Erdos.” He holds the sparkling gray book aloft, and speaks as though addressing her: “Welcome, my friend, and well done. Well done!”

THE PROTOTYPE

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
, I enter as usual and wave hello to Oliver Grone. I want to ask him about Eric, but I don’t quite have the language for it. Oliver and I have never talked directly about the weirdness of the store. So I start like this:

“Oliver, I have a question. You know how there are normal customers?”

“Not many.”

“Right. And there are members who borrow books.”

“Like Maurice Tyndall.”

“Right.” I didn’t know his name was Maurice. “Have you ever seen somebody deliver a
new
book?”

He pauses and thinks. Then he says simply: “Nope.”

*   *   *

As soon as he leaves I am a mess of new theories. Maybe Oliver’s in on it, too. Maybe he’s a spy for Corvina. The quiet watcher. Perfect. Or maybe he’s part of some deeper conspiracy. Maybe I’ve only scratched the surface. I know there are more bookstores—libraries?—like this, but I still don’t know what “like this” means. I don’t know what the Waybacklist is
for
.

I flip through the logbook from front to back, looking for something, anything. A message from the past, maybe:
Beware, good clerk, the wrath of Corvina.
But no. My predecessors played it just as straight as I have.

The words they wrote are plain and factual, just descriptions of the members as they come and go. Some of them I recognize: Tyndall, Lapin, and the rest. Others are mysteries to me—members who visit only during the day, or members who stopped visiting long ago. Judging by the dates sprinkled through the pages, the book covers a little over five years. It’s only half-full. Am I going to fill it for another five? Am I going to write dutifully for years with no idea what I’m writing
about
?

My brain is going to melt into a puddle if I keep this up all night. I need a distraction—a big, challenging distraction. So I lift my laptop’s lid and resume work on the 3-D bookstore.

Every few minutes I glance up at the front windows, out into the street beyond. I’m watching for shadows, the flash of a gray suit or the glint of a dark eye. But there’s nothing. The work smooths away the strangeness, and finally I’m in the zone.

If a 3-D model of this store is actually going to be useful, it probably needs to show you not only where the books are located but also which are currently loaned out, and to whom. So I’ve somewhat sketchily transcribed my last few weeks of logbook entries and taught my model to tell time.

Now the books glow like lamps in the blocky 3-D shelves, and they’re color-coded, so the books borrowed by Tyndall light up blue, Lapin’s green, Fedorov’s yellow, and so on. That’s pretty cool. But my new feature also introduced a bug, and now the shelves are all blinking out of existence when I rotate the store too far around. I’m sitting hunched over the code, trying in vain to figure it out, when the bell tinkles brightly.

I make an involuntary chirp of surprise. Is it Eric, back to yell at me again? Or is it Corvina, the CEO himself, come at last to visit his wrath upon—

It’s a girl. She’s leaning halfway into the store, and she’s looking at me, and she’s saying, “Are you open?”

Why,
yes
, girl with chestnut hair cropped to your chin and a red T-shirt with the word
BAM!
printed in mustard yellow—yes, as a matter of fact, we are.

“Absolutely,” I say. “You can come in. We’re always open.”

“I was just waiting for the bus and my phone buzzed—I think I have a coupon?”

She walks straight up to the front desk, pushes her phone out toward me, and there, on the little screen, is my Google ad. The hyper-targeted local campaign—I’d forgotten about it, but it’s still running, and it found someone. The digital coupon I designed is right there, peeking out of her scratched-up smartphone. Her nails are shiny.

“Yes!” I say. “That’s a great coupon. The best!” I’m talking too loud. She’s going to turn around and leave. Google’s astonishing advertising algorithms have delivered to me a supercute girl, and I have no idea what to do with her. She swivels her head to take in the store. She looks dubious.

History hinges on such small things. A difference of thirty degrees, and this story would end here. But my laptop is angled just so, and on my screen, the 3-D bookstore is spinning wildly on two axes, like a spaceship tumbling through a blank cosmos, and the girl glances down, and—

“What’s that?” she says, one eyebrow raised. One dark lovely eyebrow.

Okay, I have to play this right. Don’t make it sound too nerdy: “Well, it’s a model of this store, except you can see which books are available…”

The girl’s eyes light up: “Data visualization!” She’s no longer dubious. Suddenly she’s delighted.

“That’s right,” I say. “That’s it exactly. Here, take a look.”

We meet halfway, at the end of the desk, and I show her the 3-D bookstore, which is still disappearing whenever it spins too far around. She leans in close.

“Can I see the source code?”

If Eric’s malevolence was surprising, this girl’s curiosity is astonishing. “Sure, of course,” I say, toggling through dark windows until raw Ruby fills the screen, all color-coded red and gold and green.

“This is what I do for work,” she says, hunching down low, peering at the code. “Data viz. Do you mind?” She gestures at the keyboard. Uh, no, beautiful late-night hacker girl, I do not mind.

My limbic system has grown accustomed to a certain (very low) level of human (female) contact. With her standing right next to me, her elbow poking me just the tiniest bit, I basically feel drunk. I’m trying to formulate my next steps. I’ll recommend Edward Tufte,
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
. Penumbra has a copy—I’ve seen it on the shelf. It’s huge.

She’s scrolling fast through my code, which is a little embarrassing, because my code is full of comments like
Hell, yeah!
and
Now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding.

“This is great,” she says, smiling. “And you must be Clay?”

It’s in the code—there’s a method called
clay_is_awesome
. I assume every programmer writes one of those.

“I’m Kat,” she says. “I think I found the problem. Want to see?”

I’ve been struggling for hours, but this girl—Kat—has found the bug in my bookstore in five minutes flat. She’s a genius. She talks me through the debugging process and explains her reasoning, which is quick and confident. And then,
tap tap
, she fixes the bug.

“Sorry, I’m hogging it,” she says, swiveling the laptop back to me. She pushes a lock of hair back behind her ear, stands up straight, and says, with mock composure, “So, Clay, why are you making a model of this bookstore?” As she says it, her eyes follow the shelves up to the ceiling.

I’m not sure if I want to be completely honest about the deep strangeness of this place.
Hello, nice to meet you, I sell unreadable books to weird old people—want to get dinner?
(And suddenly I am gripped with the certainty that one of those people is going to come careening through the front door. Please, Tyndall, Fedorov, all of you: Stay home tonight. Keep reading.)

I play up a different angle: “It’s sort of a history thing,” I say. “The store’s been open for almost a century. I think it’s the oldest bookstore in the city—maybe the whole West Coast.”

“That’s amazing,” she says. “Google’s like a baby compared to that.” That explains it: this girl is a Googler. So she really is a genius. Also, one of her teeth is chipped in a cute way.

“I love data like this,” she says, nodding her chin toward my laptop. “Real-world data. Old data.”

This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay. I’ve tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it—what cocktail of characteristics comes together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star. I know it’s mostly in the face—not just the eyes but the brow, the cheeks, the mouth, and the micromuscles that connect them all.

Kat’s micromuscles are very attractive.

She says, “Have you tried doing a time-series visualization?”

“Not yet, not exactly, no.” I do not, in fact, even know what that is.

“At Google, we do them for search logs,” she says. “It’s cool—you’ll see some new idea flash across the world, like a little epidemic. Then it burns out in a week.”